Lucifer’s Lottery by Edward Lee
November, 2010
Leisure Books
304 pages
Extreme Horror / Lovecraft-adjacent
Adored this. As stated by many other reviewers the constant descriptions of Hell grow weary when one is a long-time Lee reader, but hey, it’s also what I come back for. I enjoyed this one and liked going back to the grotesquerie of the Mephistopolis outside of the City trilogy.
I was quite pleased with this crossover of his earlier work in this series where the woebegone visit Hell, and his Lovecraft fascination; which comes to full fruition in this book. As with a lot of Lee’s main characters, the cast here is all at once repulsive, compelling; we can see facets of ourselves and others we know in them no matter how hard they try to make us look away. The two main characters here are softer than most we read about in Lee’s work. Hudson himself, a theologian, works well as a tether to a kind of moral centre on his awkward tour of Hell led by none other than Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
I’d lent this to a horror punk band travelling 1000 kilometres away to record an album and they all read it in turn so I always think of this as a good book when you are plunged into regions unknown, feel a little like an outsider, and need something that reflects that. Any City trilogy book would work as well, but this is even more of a carnival ride than most, and maybe a little less intense.